Key process, management & organizational interactions

(P)REVIEWDesign education for business and engineering management students

Authors:
Terry Winograd

Don Norman is the “Don” of interaction design, having written
several of the most influential books and spoken, consulted, and
led design research at companies such as Apple and HP. The
progression of his interests and insights over the years has led
the path of HCI and interaction design. Every few years he has
turned the field’s attention in new directions, leading to new
understanding and new practical potentials. To oversimplify, as
we must for someone as productive and wide-ranging, he has
shepherded in and written key books on a series of perspective
shifts:

 Cognition as an empirical science in Memory and
Attention: An introduction to human information processing
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969). This and several other books
went along with his cofounding of the first Department of
Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society.

 Usability in The Design of Everyday Things,
(Doubleday 1988). This book led to much of the current HCI
research agenda, along with the cognitive agenda and a long
relationship with Jakob Nielsen in usability consulting.

 Emotion and affect in Emotional Design: Why We Love
(or Hate) Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2003). Having led the
study of people as “cognitive processors,” Don shifted attention
to the role that emotions play in our interactions with everyday
objects.

 Business in The Invisible Computer: Why Good
Products Can Fail (The MIT Press, 1998). After his
experiences at Apple and HP, his attention was directed to all
the things that make the difference between successful and
unsuccessful products, beyond their user design.

So at this point, what can we expect next from Don? The
seemingly unlikely context is that his current project is to
develop a new teaching program at Northwestern University: a
“design track” in the Master of Manufacturing and Management
program (MMM). The new program is a joint enterprise between the
Kellogg School of Business and the McCormick Engineering School
(http:// mmm.northwestern.edu).

But why manufacturing?

Don’s insight is that manufacturing has more to do with
interaction design than you would think. The connection goes
through “operations”:

 The essence of successful manufacturing is not a matter
of the physical products, but of the operational processes that a
company can put into place to create an effective flow of
information, materials, and labor. Big manufacturing innovations
come from new ways of thinking about supply chains. From his
engineering training, Don says it’s really all about queues and
buffers.

 The essence of successful interactive products is not
just the interaction an end user has with the product, but with
the whole range of operations that make that interaction work.
The poster child example is the iPod, which does have excellent
usability design but would not be successful without the whole
chain that provides for music access. In some sense, the success
of the iPod is the success of iTunes, which in turn is not a
program but a service.

No product or service is successful without a front end and a
back end, but design as now practiced usually concentrates on the
front end rather than the operations-centric design of the back
end. Don’s vision for the future of interaction design is to
extend our reach from improving the design of the product in hand
to designing the larger ecosystemthe service
infrastructure that makes the product really work. He believes
that the confluence of operations and design has great power. He
wants interaction designers to move beyond being critics of
devices to being innovators in the value chaincontributing
solutions, not just finding problems. Interaction designers need
to be able to frame their contributions in terms of the bottom
lines that will motivate companies to move their designs into
real use.

So it’s not so surprising that his current collaboration is
with a business school (Don codirects the program with business
professor Sudhakar Deshmukh). The new program is a design track
within the two-year master’s degree MMM program. Students will
receive both an MBA and a master’s in engineering management, but
they won’t become designers! That is another key insight that
drives this program, as well as its companion program in the
engineering school (a one-year master’s degree in engineering
design and innovation). To get design into effective practice,
you need to train designers and also to teach the people they
work with how to understand, incorporate, and foster design. The
programs aim to train businesspeople and engineers to work with
designers, not to turn them into one-year design wonders. This
philosophy is also at the heart of new programs around the world,
such as the Stanford d.school, which talks about creating
“T-shaped people.” Such people maintain the depth and focus of a
single discipline while adding a “crossbar” of design thinking
that drives the integration of multiple perspectives into solving
real problems.

The interdisciplinary commitment of MMM is deepnot just
a combination of perspectives in the courses, but a focus on how
to make that combination work in organizations. The goal is to
foster design thinking in the managers and engineers who will
work with designersa goal that will produce the people who
IDEO CEO Tim Brown says are critical to the design-driven
organization. There needs to be an interplay between the HCI
point of view (the end users looking into the system from their
outside vantage point) and the operations point of view (the
structure and functioning of the whole system, from the inside).
Design will require optimizing from multiple points of view.

The Northwestern University design program as a whole is
intended to complement existing HCI and design programs (of which
there are several in the Chicago area) and to put greater focus
on a business perspective than interdisciplinary programs that
grew out of product design, such as Stanford’s d.school. It is
philosophically aligned with programs such as the joint MBA and
design program at the Institute of Design, the master of
engineering management at Cornell, and the curriculum in
“integrative thinking” at the Rotman School in Toronto. But MMM’s
focus on the design of operations is unique.

The structure of the program is still evolving, but the basic
outlines are clear. Students in the MMM design track will take
courses along with other MBA students in the three basic
components of businessfinance, marketing, and
operationsand will do an industry internship. The design
track will add new courses on the operations side, taught by both
the regular faculty and consulting faculty with experience in
design, such as Karen Holtzblatt of InContext and Larry Keeley
from Doblin Design. Students in the engineering design and
innovation program (codirected by Ed Colgate) will join the MMM
designers in this series of courses, which includes an
integrative project course in which a small group works with a
company on a real design problem.

Of course, this will all change as they try it out. Don admits
that he really doesn’t know yet what he will be doing. As he
said, “I never understand what I’m working on while I’m working
on it. When I do, I write a book and move on.” At this point the
book isn’t yet written; this review of the program is
prospective. Don is well aware of the problems that lie ahead in
turning a good idea into effective action. This program is one of
many experiments in design teaching going on around the world,
and a few years from now we’ll all read the books and help write
the next chapter in interaction design.

Author

Terry Winograd
Stanford University
winograd@cs.stanford.edu

About the Author

Terry Winograd’s focus is on human-computer interaction
design, with a focus on the theoretical background and conceptual
models. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the
Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group. He is also a founding
faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at
Stanford (the “d.school”). Winograd was also a founding member
and past president of Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards,
including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on
Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica, and is the author of
many books.

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